How to Link Your Goals to Your Strategy

For a goal to be relevant, it has to tie to the broader purpose and goals of the entire organization. Your strategy is going to help drive that. The strategy consists of a desired future state and definition of how you’re going to get there. You should break that strategy down into smaller, interim goals on that path. Every goal that gets set in the organization should be linked to that broader element of your strategy.

How to Tie Your Goals to the Broader Mission

How do you do that? Take a look at your vision and your mission. Look at where you’re going as an organization. Break that down into major themes over the course of the strategic planning period. For each theme, break that down into actions you’ll have to take to achieve that theme. For each action, break that down into sub-actions until you can set an individual goal for each of those actions.

Case Study: Lawn and Garden Company

I worked for a lawn and garden company at one point and I was in the strategic planning group. We said we’re no longer going to just be a lawn and garden company. We’re going to move into outdoor living. It was a much broader expansion strategy.

For each part of the organization, we set goals that were tied to that outdoor living strategy. Our consumer package goods business had goals for new product line expansion and getting into new categories. Our services business had goals for offering new services. Even in the strategy group, we had goals for achieving that outdoor living strategy.

We had goals for how many acquisitions we would do and what categories we were going to enter. For each acquisition, we had goals related to targets we were going to make offers to. We had a time for when we were going to make the offer. We had deadlines for making a deal. We had deadlines and goals around integration, execution of the plan, and expansion of those businesses once they were acquired.

Every single one of those goals tied to a broader strategic theme, and those themes tied to the broader strategy of getting into outdoor living. We all knew how we were contributing to the broader strategy. Therefore, our goals made sense and they were meaningful and relevant to the mission of the organization.

When you set your goals, make sure that you can go from strategy to themes to actions to goals, and then explain to the members of your team how those goals roll up to the broader strategy. It will give their work meaning and help them understand how they fit in.